[beschizza]

A key difference between Sinclair and Jobs was Sinclair's hostility to quality control and UX. Cheap at all costs! I would liken Sinclair to Jay Miner, perhaps: an engineering genius with a tendency to hit the reset button on business affairs over and over again.

Closer to Jobs in the UK scene was--and I know this is maybe a funny claim--Alan Sugar. The key similarity being the mid-1980s intuition that computers needed to be simple all-in-one consumer products. Jobs was tuned to the needs of the creative and professional classes, whereas Sugar was aiming for working class families, so the machines were very different.

But the reality is there aren't easy matches. The UK didn't produce people who were good at computers, good at business, and had access to enough capital to achieve escape velocity in the 1980s. Even when ARM bore fruit it was sold off, same as everything else there.

[t43562]

America was a much richer market and Apple would never have reached the masses in a poorer place.

Spectrums didn't just kickstart programming in the UK but in places in Central/Eastern Europe too. I'm from Zimbabwe and they reached us too long before anyone could afford standard American fare.

That cost was absolutely critical. ARM and Raspberry Pi show you how the UK has been incredibly good at bringing computing and computing skills to people.

We programmers from everywhere have patched together Linux from bits and with this cheap commodity hardware, have made a world in which there is no locked door in our own house which we are denied the right to open.

[Symbiote]

ARM does originate from education — the Acorn RISC Machine was created by Acorn following on from the success of the BBC computer, which was developed to improve computing education in schools. It was first used in the Acorn Archimedes computer.

Acorn Archimedes which used it was relatively expensive though — £686 (without monitor) in 1990.

http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Brochu...

[throw_away_x2]

Reminds me of the posters for Linux that I saw at the time

"In a world without borders and fences, who needs Windows and Gates"

[jajko]

Yeah those costs allowed many (not only) kids in poorer countries to actually own a first computer. Apple even at those times would not be reachable. Spectrum clones were extremely popular in central/eastern Europe, for many an introduction to computers.